Does quantum computing mean chaos?
So why is internet security, as it stands today, a ticking time bomb? Would there be chaos if quantum computing became mainstream, and what are the chances of that happening? These are the questions that have largely been troubling nation states worried about cyber warfare. CEOs of top banks and healthcare firms dealing with sensitive client data are also worried about data security.
Let's quickly look at where the quantum computing world is and why it might be a threat to global data security. In 1994, Peter Shor presented two quantum algorithms. One that could factor large prime numbers and another that could compute discrete logarithms in a finite field of prime order. The former could be a threat to the RSA method, and the latter would address elliptic curves.
Shor essentially showed that almost all public key encryption techniques we use today can be cracked using a quantum Fourier attack. He used quantum Fourier sampling to find the...